Morrowind_ob.esm Help Requested

That was my thinking too!

You are a major contributor to the project, so I value your opinion.

Thanks for your input.

I will look at the southern half of Balmora.

Thanks for the background on Caldera. That makes my choice even easier.

When I'm ready, how should I send the files?

When you are read to send me a mod, go to www.MediaFire.com, upload the file, and then send me the link in a PM.

I can finally remove another completed item from the list!

Popo has completed his Sitting in Morroblivion project! Thank You!!!

I am working on optmizing the misc objects the amount of vertices in some of these are absurd and no doubt are a major source of lag, additionally some still dont have collision.

example ndbucket01 has 19001 vertices and 14790 faces ....I am going to make a personal bet on how low I can get the poly to be on this one

There has been no activity on this page in over two months. People that had projects reserved have stopped sending me updates, and in most cases have not been back to the site in weeks or months.

Hashmi has sent me a few random fixes, but that is not enough by itself for a release.

There has been more activity on this Morroblivion site about Skyrim than Morroblivion. I am hopeful that the projects still reserved will be completed, but I know that these authors are now busy playing Skyrim, so I am not counting on updates from most of them any time soon.

Darth South attempted to get an assessment of where this project is after Skyrim on this thread:
http://morroblivion.com/forums/morroblivion/general/2190

I think the lack of interest/response to his thread is an assessment in and of iteself.

Skyrim has killed this project.

I don't think so. Skyrim, being an internet enabled game that you can't own (just rent) is not going to have the lifespan of either morrowind or oblivion.  The 'activity' I see here on the forums about skyrim is mostly a debate about wheather or not you need Steam to run it. (you do)  That by itself is reason enough for me to stay away from skirim, and I'm sure a lot of others feel the same way.

Keep the project active, Dave. It is worth the pain.

Steff

Yeah I have barely even played much of Skyrim.  My imploding personal life has left me very little time to play video games unfortunately.

I think there is a lot of interest in porting Morroblivion to the Skyrim engine -- that is the main topic of those threads here on the site. 

Anyway, it has only been a month since Skyrim was released - give people time to get through the game and explore everything.  Skyrim is estimated at over 300 hours for a "100% completion" playthrough.  So for people to be finished already, they would have to be playing about 75 hours a week!

I think the Morroblivion project will go on, but it will probably be at a slower pace for the next few months until people get Skyrim out of their systems. 

On the plus side, traffic on our website has never been higher - mostly due to links here from various gaming articles and forums.

This is just my personal view,but I do not think that morroblivion is dead.

And skyrim can be played outside of steam [I do it most days],as long as you only use v1.1 of TesV.exe and don`t use the skse.All you have to do is have a separate folder named "Skyrim" outside of the Steam folder [anywhere you want] and run it from there.

I can do anything with that folder without steam even knowing about it or caring,but not being able to use the skse does mean that if future mods are made using skse I can`t use them in that folder,but as a mod free game np.

But saying that I have still got most mods for skyrim working in my standalone folder,and if I want I can still run the steam version.

There is land for morrowind [morroblivion] or part of it already on the skyrim map and in the LOD files,and part of Oblivion too so using those cut down landmasses with a good backup story line is still possible.

And imo with some editing it could be possible to port morroblivion into skyrim and also part of the oblivion land etc.

Oblivion is no longer the game of standard; Skyrim is. Morrowind had a fanatical, passionate following, yet fell away as Oblivion took over as the game of standard. Oblivion does not have the same type of passionate following; it will fade even more quickly than Morrowind did.

Whether we like it or not, Oblivion is now obsolete.

I will never play Skyrim.

But, Steph and I may be the ONLY ones; everybody else ran right out and got Steam; there are over 30 million users on Steam, so to think that Bethesda cares about the few that don't is not real. A year or two from now it will not even be possible to buy a game that does not require Steam.

I will keep checking for updates to this project, and hopefully Morroblivion will live on, but even before Skyrim came out, as I had said, there has been no activity on this page for two months, and contributions to this project have all but stopped.

To make this project live on we need people, and we need contributions, and we need somebody besides me, somebody that knows Morrowind, to come up with more topics for this Help Requested page.

Porting Morroblivion to Skyrim is just a daydream, but that's OK, dreams are fun, and that is, after all, what gaming is all about. Bethesda Could have made it possible to use resources interchangably between Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, but they have chosen not to. Bethesda stops supporting their games after they have release their expansions and have milked all the mainstream money they think they can out of a game, then they move on to their next thing, and have specifically designed their games not to be compatible with each other.

At some point I will get back to Morroblivion and give it an overhaul like OOO did for Oblivion, but that is still a long way off. I am still more of a player than a modder, and having not played at all for an entire year while working on this project has pent up some play time, so now I am exploring Cyrodiil. I haven't even made it to Elseweyr yet...

Dave,

I understand what you are saying and I too think that Morrowind is and was the best Beth game.

I know at this time it`s a dream [but an interesting one],if morroblivion could be ported to the skyrim engine,would you them play it in that engine.?

Daydreaming about things that could be possible for "somebody" to do is fine, but who?

A good deal of the daydreaming, talk, and suggestions on this site have always been in the context of "somebody should do this."

Who?

The missing ingredient in porting anything to anything is somebody with the skills and knowledge... and the inclination to do so.

We can't even get enough people to contribute to THIS project to ever "finish" it.

How then, are we going to get "somebody" to port Morrowind to Skyrim for us?

This project would not even exist if Galadrielle had been given the opportunity to finish what she started; there would not have been any need, but Bethesda Squashed Morroblivion.

Why does aybody think that they won't squash Morrowind being ported to Skyrim?????

Bah Humbug  David!

Steph, Thermador, and Ironman are right. Listen to your people!

Morroblivion may be sleeping, but it certainly isn't dead. Let the new game of the year cool off before you throw in the towel.

Hmm. If I may daydream: Perhaps the Lady of the Wood will return and attempt to port Skyrim.

Also, all records seem to be breaking by Skyrim's hand. This is bound to bring new people with new skills and knowledge.

Ironman: I'm currently running Skyrim 1.1 (along with SKSE). On that laptop its in the steam folder and on the desktop its in a games\skyrim folder. Both run without opening steam. So you may be able to run skse (old version) after all, though if it updates, who knows?

Thanks for the info Iceburg,but where do I get the "old" version of the skse.?

It ain`t on offcial se`s site.?

Hello

1.) I`ve created a fix for some misplaced items (gold coins, repair hammers, some baskets and candles)

Is it still needed?

2.) I`ve noticed that in Morrowind_ob.esm all gold coins, repair hammers, lockpicks and probes are set to be persistent references. Doesn`t make sense to me.

Is it a bug or intended feature? And if its inteneded - why?

Fixes have been included in v049 of the Master.

Thank you qwertyasdfgh!

I'm working on cell ownership and NPC AI. Do I need to coordinate it with somebody?

The last person to work on AI was Oldwolf58, but he hasn't logged in for 13 weeks and hasn't responded to his PMs either, so I doubt he's still working on it.  He was working on AI from v042 through v044.

Before that, henshu was doing AI between versions v027 through v033.  She hasn't been online for 20 weeks, and I don't think she's working on AI anymore.

Before that, Didact1 was doing AI between versions v020 through v025.  He hasn't been online for 3 weeks, and I don't think he's working on AI anymore.

For more info on this, you can search the project release thread for the phrase "AI".

--

Be careful with AI if you have not experienced with the intricacies of adding AI to a game that wasn't designed for it.

First problem: there aren't enough beds / space in Morrowind for everyone.  Henshu dealt with the limited-beds problem by adding new beds (or even expanding new rooms) in unobtrusive areas, like basements etc., but you have to be pretty experienced with the construction set to make it work right. Check out the basement in the Balmora Thieves guild for an example.

Second problem: a lot of locations aren't designed for NPCs to move around - hallways aren't wide enough, not enough open spaces etc.  Staggering the go-to-bed / get-out-of-bed / eat / wander times for each NPC in a cell is really important, otherwise they get all jammed up when they try to go to bed all at once. 

Third problem: It can be hard for NPCs to get to where they need to go.  For example, in Balmora, currently the guards can't walk up the steps to the guard tower, so they just collect at the bottom -- the ground needs to be raised a bit so they can get up the stairs.  If they were the player, they could jump but apparently NPCs cannot jump. So testing AI and making sure it works in-game is really important.

Fourth problem: There are many problems with getting the guilds and merchants to function properly.  They need to lock and unlock their doors, eat at the right table, sleep in the right bed, and not have every member of a guild follow you around like a puppy dog while you are in their guild building.  This is related to setting cell ownership, bed ownership, door ownership, putting the right door keys in NPC's inventory, etc. etc.  It can get really complicated, especially for guild halls and inns.

So definitely read up a lot on it if you are not a VERY experienced Oblivion modder.  There are a lot of good tutorials on the CS Wiki.

---

EDIT: here is a little bit more info on AI: http://morroblivion.com/caldera-pawnbroker-shop-off-limits

Thanks for the tips - I'll keep that in mind.

And yes, I always test packages ingame after I add them.

Yeah you seem like you know what you're doing. :)  I did a bunch of fixes for AI in Caldera last night at that link I posted earlier.

I'll be careful in Caldera

Edited main post to add Tribunal Bug Fixing and Bloodmoon Bug Fixing, as these are long tasks that need a dedicated, knowledgable person to work through.

Red Stapler, I get the sense from your writing that you like being a "manager" more than a "worker."  Sounds great, but this is a community project - the "managers" are such because they are the best workers (in there respective areas of the project).  Call it a meritocracy if you want, but it is also an easy way to identify people who are really dedicated, and with the come-and-go-as-you-please nature of this project, the forums / bugs & issues layout works pretty well -- everything is on record and searchable for future contributors, unlike chatrooms or other types of websites.

I knew NOTHING about video game mods, the construction set or much of the original game of Morrowind.  However, I thought the combat and physics were bollocks when I first played it and was trying to find out about a way to get it in the Oblivion engine.  I stumbled on Morroblivion, and the first thing I realized was that the site was built with a toolkit that I was very experienced with and that my skills in web content management could be put to good use here. 

From there, I started learning how to use the contruction set by trial and error.  When I couldn't figure something out, I went to the CS Wiki, UESP, or searched google.  My first mod ever, the Chargen and Transport mod, has gone through eight versions and will probably see a ninth and tenth as I learn more about the game.  If you want to really learn the construction set, the best way to start is to build you own mod.

I don't know if anyone here is a good teacher, or would be willing to spend the time (on GoToMeeting or some rubbish?) trying to guide you through the process.  The best way is to learn by doing.

The main thing that Tribunal and Bloodmoon need are someone who is familiar with the quests of both expansions and how they are supposed to work (I am not) as well as someone who is good at bug testing and figuring out where things went wrong in Oblivion's quest and dialogue system (the "Q" button at the top of the CS).  You then just play the game and take notes while you play (e.g. "Bal Molagmer Questline: If you first refuse to buy Brallion's Ring, you can't buy it from him later") and then switch back and forth between the two, fixing as you go and making tons of saves and testing all possible quest paths.

Red Stapler asked me to delete his account.

I have also removed his posts from this thread, but when I deleted the response I had made, that also took a couple of others with that I was not intending to delete, so my apologies Darth & Robert.

How odd... but not unexpected.

No worries David.

I wanted to say this when Red Stapler was still here, but every time I hear the word "management" or specificially "project management" I cringe.

From my experience, us technicians and engineers don't really like management because they:

• Tend to interfere with our work and don't actually contribute to the project.
• Tie our hands behind our backs and tell us what we can and can't do.
• Tell us how some totally new project needed to be done yesterday.
• Wonder why we do a half @ss job on a certain project, while they were the ones who voted on making the budget cut that undermined the whole project (all management thinks is "saving money.")

I think how we have things set up right now, where everyone contributes, is the best for this project. We have a couple of really talented guys, the "team leads" (David, Thermador, Hashmi, Eloth) that actually do work, contribute, and manage. This is almost always the best method of management, because these guys are working directly with the team and know exactly what their team needs to get the job done.

We don't need bureauacracy crap. We have good "team managment" (not project management) as it is right now, and I don't think any other method would really work any better.

2 Points to Thermador and Robert.
Of course, if anyone would like to refer to me as "El Presidante" or "Chief",  I will gladly accept. 

On the subject of contributing,I would like to take this oppotunity to state that apart from my total interest in trying to help,I have not contributed much to the project in general.

I would like to see morroblivion reach total completion,but at 74 years of age I just try to keep the dream alive.

And would also like to see the morroblivion project someday being played in the Skyrim engine.

I like visiting this site and wish that I had more skills to contribute more.

I hope that contribution is not the only important thing here,as if that is the case I should not be here.?

Ironman, you have contributed plenty just by being here.

Anybody can contribute. I didn't know anything about Morrowind or modding when I started, but there are many ways to contribute besides creating mods.

I am glad you are here, and so too are others.

Lots of ways to contribute besides modding:

• Just play Morroblivion: take notes on the bugs you find and post them - even if you can't fix them, the fact that we know about the bug's existence is half the battle.  Further, everyone plays differently and in an open-world game like Morrowind, some bugs will show up for some people and not others.
  
• Post on our forums: keeps the forums active and drives up our search rankings when people search for things like "oblivion mods" or "morrowind mods" - the more active our site is, the higher the ranking.  Almost 50% of our pageviews each day are google's bot indexing our site and determining what is going on here in order to place us in search rankings.
• Tell your friends: the more people that know about the project, the better (but please don't go posting on the official forums or nexus forums because Bethesda has asked people not to do that).

Ironman, you just being active on these forums and playing the mod, as David and Thermador have said, is a great contribution in itself.

I'm glad to have you here man.

And like Thermador said, just playing the mod and reporting bugs, or throwing in your Morrowind expertise is very valuable in itself.

Thanks! for the kind words all.

I can mod new mods but don`t seem to get my head around fixing mods already done.

Are we trying to make morroblivion exactly like morrowind?,or are new story side quests cool.?

Everybody has their own vision of what Morroblivion "should" be. However, most of the people that want Morroblivion to follow Morrowind in every detail seem to have gone back to play Morrowind with graphics extenders, etc.

When I posted an open request for things that needed addressing on this Help Requested Page, what I got was a litany of way in which Oblivion is not like Morrowind, none of it having anything to do with Morroblivion or that we could actually fix.

We have, in many ways, "Oblivionized" Morrowind, that is, added enhancements, etc., that Oblivion has that Morrowind did not, Fast Travel, Quest Markers, and Radiant AI, for instance.

Anything you do is fine. The base Morrowind_ob.esm Project is (more or less) about fixing things instead of adding content, although this concept is stretched somewhat when adding NPC AI and extra beds to accommodate them, etc.

If you want to help fix things, that's fine, but if you want to make mods that add new content, that's fine too.

At some point I myself plan to create a mod that overhauls Morroblivion in many of the same ways that OOO overhauled Oblivion, but at this point is premature to even talk about what I plan on doing.

The current version of morroblivion is not exactly like original morrowind .. I think it's better.  I would like to see the conversation boxes not show "Join the Mages Guild" (or similar) after I've already joined or completed whatever.  Overall, morroblivion has become what Bethsoft should have done a long time ago.

Alexa says this site is currently ranked at 320,791

Me and a group of friends would happily do some of the voices for this. Obviously we cant do every line, but if you give us either some main charecters or some generic NPC lines we will do as much as possible all though you will need to tell me EXACTLy what we need to do to get started

EDIT: i should add that i have a studio so quality will be fine, we are all drama students (pretty good might i say), and i have studied sound engineering

Sweet! Everything you should need to know can be found on this thread: http://morroblivion.com/forums/morroblivion/mods/1648
Instructions are on the first page, and a lot of questions can be answered by skimming the thread. If you have a question, post it there, and I'll see what I can do to answer it. I havn't seen Sot on for a while, but RobertNeville should also be able to answer some questions for you. He's done a lot of great audio work for Morroblivion. Check out his thread here: http://morroblivion.com/forums/morroblivion/mods/2000
 
It's been a while since the voice over project has been worked on, so I'm stoked to hear there's some new interest! 

I just recently started playing Morroblivion, and I have seen a couple of things through my playing that should be fixed. Rather than just post bug reports, I've decided to dabble in the construction set and see if I can fix some of the stuff myself. This is somewhat ironic, as I've thought I'd like to get into Skyrim modding, but I played Skyrim incessently for 3 months after its release and now am so sick of it I can barely stand opening it (everything is just TOO familiar, so I need to stay away from it until its less fresh). So, I'm starting my foray into modding with Oblivion rather than the latest entry.

I am a quite inexperienced modder at this time, but I'm hoping to become better through trial and error as I'm learning to fix what I want to fix. As I am inexperienced (and I'm still at the stage where I mostly just want to play and enjoy the mod), I don't want to take on a big project, but I am wondering if you feel it would still be helpful to pursue making minor bugfixes as I play and sending you my work. So far all I've done is fixed wall and floor object misplacement issue in Uulneril the Armorer's shop in Pelagiad and fixed an issue where the game doesn't add the dialogue topic "seen him get angry" to Thavere Vedrano when doing the Death of a Taxman quest (where she identifies who the taxman was arguing with), but I hope to do more little fixes here and there as I play (and maybe later as I've played more and become more familiar with the CS I can take on larger fixes or additions).

Thank you, anything you can do would be fine.

Maybe read through some of my older posts, like when I announced the 1 year anniversary of my part in this project (Morrowind_ob Project Release Thread).

I was not an experience modder when I started, either

Is anyone working on the AI project at the moment? If so, I would be interested in joining up so that we can better coordinate our efforts. Otherwise, I'll just continue to work on my own little projects and release them as mod patches for those who might also be interested in them. I've already worked on the AI for master trainers, so my next goal is to review all of the non-master trainers to make sure that they are offering services properly too.

One thing I am curious about, though, is whether or not there was a review of trainer balancing. From my playthroughs of the V051 release so far, it seems that some training types are very common, others rare. Morrowind was sort of like this, but I've also noticed at least two instances where trainers were offering skill training types that they did not offer at all in Morrowind. I'll leave this alone for now in case there is a design and logic to it that I am unaware of.

My next goal for after the trainers are sorted is to look into preventing the publicans (and sometimes random people instead!) from following you everywhere in their taverns/inns, even into your rented room! I'll have to research why this occurs because immediately all I know is that it's the same type of behaviour exhibited by Oblivion shop owners.

Best regards,

Jessica

I am

This is caused by "Continue if PC Near" flag on their AI packages

Thanks for the reply, qwertyasdfg! Very impressive work on AI so far! I've sent you a PM.

Best regards,

Jessica

Training has been "updated," yes. However, as soon as this mod was merged, people were already unhappy with it, but training has definitely been attempted in the past.

This project has, unfortunately, been somewhat like that. For instance, FOUR different people have tried their hand at "fixing" magic, but nobody has gotten it right.

I believe merchants following you around like puppy dogs is the default behavior for any merchant that owns a store, or that is part of a faction that owns any interior that you walk into. Oblivion merchants are like that too, and it is very annoying, albiet probably somewhat realistic, as in real life when you walk into a store salesmen attack you! Thermador ran into that when he originally started fixing merchants. I know that the solution is AI, but I do not understand it or really know why.

Hey Dave B I'm new, but saw the top April 8th post and would love to help. I've been making mods using Creation Kit so I know that well, but I do know the Construction Set pretty well too - enough to get done some things listed.

I don't know exactly what is left to be done from the list, but if you can let me know here and I'll check back to see what I can do. You can email me too - whatever works.

Have a good one!
anathemastudio

What is left on the list? All of it. I remove things from the list when they are completed.

The list is just some suggestions and obvservations of things needing to be done.

Do what you know best.

Remember "Jaws",just when you think it is safe to go into the water,the sharks return.

Morrowind in Oblivion is like that to me,so I intend to do as much work on this project as I can in future,as in my opion it deserves finishing.

I have spent a lot of time on the SkyWind threads,and will continue to try to keep that master up to date with the VC,

But most of my spare time in future will be used to help with the morroblivion project.

I like Skyrim and play it,but am still drawn to morroblivion like a magnet.

Is the morroblivion project being left to die.?

I like the idea and the progress that is being made getting in into skyrim,but with tribunal and bloodmoon still needing lots of work will we ever return to finish this project.?

To be honest Ironman, Morroblivion is complete.  I can play through it from start to finish, and have a great time too.  It has done what it set out to do, recreate Morrowind within the limits of the Oblivion engine. Of course it could always get better, and the expansions could get completed, but we really need all the talent we can get to work on Skywind.  Actually I kind of find it sad that so much talent is still working on Morroblivion, when we desperately need that help.  But of course this is my own opinion, and I am sure many others feel different.  Especially those who have worked on Morroblivion for several years, and seen it through its infancy.  But I just want to say this: The whole point of Morroblivion was to recreate Morrowind in the newest elder scroll engine of the time, which is now the Skyrim engine.  It offers so many more possibilities, and has so much more potential to recreate Morrowind than the Oblivion engine ever did.  Morroblivion will not die, we are simply moving the project forward to the next step.  We are keeping every advancement made for Morroblivion that we can and not just starting over from scratch.  I think this is all I will say here, I hope everyone can understand my view.

I agree 100% with you, Shadow. We're not abandoning the Morroblivion project, we're furthering it by converting Morroblivion to the newest standard. To me, it doesn't make much sense working with an older engine, when we know it's life is coming to an end. On the other hand, Skyrim's engine will be the most up to date elder scrolls engine for quite a while, at least four more years I would guess. That, and I believe that Skryim's game engine fits Morrowind's atmosphere and feel much more, it's darker and grittier than Oblivion's squeaky clean, shiny, and bright atmosphere.

However, I do feel for the Morroblivion guys, because they probably do feel left out in the cold. They want to make it better, and it is getting much better, thanks to Qwerty. I still love the Morroblivion guys, and hope for the best for them. I appreciate the hard work they put into that project, and I know how it is to put a lot of work into a project and get barely any recognition for it. I spent all last summer putting in the original Morrowind voices, and barely got any recognition, credit for it. But like David told me, that's just the way how it is. Thankfully, every once in a while, someone will drop in and give the Morroblivion team the time and thanks they deserve.

Heck, that's me complaining about one small mod I made for Morroblivion. I can't imagine what David, Thermador, Hashmi, Eloth, Queen of the Ashlands, and all the others who put in MUCH more time than me into this project, how they are feeling about the "Skywind" takeover. 

I think once we get Skywind off the ground, like if we ever post videos, we put a proper thanks, credit, and link in the description to the Morroblivion team.

Because Skywind would not possible without the Morroblivion team.

Thanks for the reply Shadow,I will continue working on both projects though,as I think it would be great to have 2 versions of morrowind,both done by this sites members.)

I agree 120% with you Clint.  I couldn't have said that better myself.